Literature’s Best Train Trips

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 09.07.10 | 12:54 PM ET

The Guardian lists 10 of them, including ones in JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” Graham Greene’s “Stamboul Train” and Thomas Hardy’s “Midnight on the Great Western.” Of the latter, John Mullan writes:

Hardy’s poem is a vignette of Victorian public transport, preserved forever. By “the roof-lamp’s oily flame” a boy is seen half asleep in his third-class seat, his ticket stuck in his hat band, “Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going, / Or whence he came”.